25 January 2023 – Palm oil is used in food and other products, but it’s bad for our environment. Now a US-based company has come up with an eco-friendly alternative to replace it.
Pam oil is in everything from food to cosmetics and personal care products, because it is so useful. It has no smell, taste or colour and stays stable even at high temperatures.
This makes it perfect for so many products, especially food. It improves the texture and is also a natural preservative. In fact, it’s so useful that you will find it on almost 50% of all products in our supermarkets, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
But it’s also bad news for our environment. That’s why C16 Bioschiences has developed an eco-friendly alternative called Palmless.
What Is Palm Oil?
Palm oil is a vegetable oil that is made from oil palm trees. It can either be made by squeezing the palm fruit, which is called crude palm oil, or from the seeds of the fruits, which is then called palm kernel oil.
The oil is edible, so can be used in food. Oil palm trees originate in Africa, but have been also grown in Sout-East Asia for over a century. It was brought there as an ornamental plant initially.
Today, 85% of all palm oil is produced in Indonesia and Malaysia, but other countries do also make it.
The properties of this oil are very special. It’s the reason why your chocolate spread is spreadable and why ketchup has such a long shelf life. But it’s also responsible for your chips being so crispy and crunchy.
Unlike other oils, such as olive oil, palm oil has no smell or taste, so will not impact on the products it’s added to.
Growing oil palm trees is also easy and efficient. Growers can get a lot of oil from a small plot, which makes it a great choice for many farmers.
You get so much more oil per hectare [from oil palms] than any other oil crop. Oil palms produce about 5,000 kg [of oil] per hectare per year, rapeseed about 1,000 kg per hectare per year, and soybean 400 kg per hectare per year.
Chris Chuck, Professor of Bioprocess Engineering at the University of Bath
Why Is It Bad For Our Planet?
It’s common knowledge now that our use of palm oil has a negative impact on our planet. Because it’s so easy to grow and gives smallholders a secure income, it’s responsible for deforestation in many countries.
Through it, we lose some of the most biodiverse forests. And with it the habitats of many animals that are already endangered, such as the Orangutan or pygmy elephant.
We also lose millions of trees that would otherwise absorb carbon dioxide from the environment. The deforestation has accelerated sharply since the 1970s, when 3.3 million hectares were converted. In 2020, we lost 28.7 million hectares to oil palm tree production.
And it’s not just trees we lose. Peat soils are also converted to oil palm fields.
These peat soils hold millions of tonnes of carbon, which is released as greenhouse gases during the conversion. That’s why the news of a viable alternative is an exciting prospect.
Palmless
Shara Ticku co-founded C16 Bioscience in New York City in 2018. She received financial backing from Bill Gates, which gave her the funding she needed to develop a viable alternative to palm oil.
After four years of research, the company has come up with their product, called Plamless.
It’s an oil that has similar properties to palm oil, but it comes from a fungus. The company grows a strain of yeast, which naturally produces the oil that can be harvested.
The yeast is fed with sugars from sugar cane plants, which are grown on land that was already used for farming, so no deforestation had to take place.
Harvest can take place in seven days, so much faster than with oil palm trees.
Our process takes less than seven days from start to finish. For a traditional oil palm tree, the oil wouldn’t be ready to harvest until years after the seed is planted, and most trees don’t reach peak production until seven years later.
Spokeswoman for C16 Bioscience
C16 Bioscience has already established partnerships with manufacturers in the beauty and personal care industry, to use Palmless in moisturisers, soaps and nourishing oils. The company plans to approach the food industry in 2024.
A team at the University of Bath, led by Professor Chris Chuck, is also looking into ways of reducing our reliance on palm oil. They also try to find a yeast that will produce oil that could replace palm oil.
The process involves forcing the yeast to evolve until it’s hardy and not fussed about what it eats. That way it can be fed on cheap materials such as grass or food waste.
The pilot project has been successful, and the next step is to scale up the oil production. For that purpose, a private business has been set up, called Clean Food Group. This new business has partnered up with a UK supermarket, details are not yet known.
It looks like there is an appetite to create an alternative to palm oil that can be produced sustainable without harming our planet.
